Early Canadian Literature in English: A Survey and a Challenge

Abstract

On January 1, 1767, Arabella Fermor wrote to a friend in England about amazingly intense cold she was experiencing at her house on banks of St. Lawrence River near Quebec; I no longer wonder, she concluded, that the arts are unknown here. ... Genius will never mount high, where faculties of mind are benumbed half year (103). Arabella is a character in The History of Emily Montague (1769), first Canadian novel that, according to Carl F. Klinck, has claims to being the first American one as well (v-vii), and passage is at least partly designed to reveal her coquetry and wit. Frances Moore Brooke (1724-89), English author of this work, also resided in Quebec in 1760s, however, and it is likely that she shared Arabella's views, both about climate and culture of Great Britain's newest North American colony. In mid-eighteenth century, in fact, there was little about country that is now Canada to render an elegant European confident in either its political or artistic future. Even though Canada had been explored from Atlantic, Pacific, and Hudson's Bay, it was a huge and largely unknown territory. It was also thinly settled. Few English-speaking people of European origin lived even in most developed colonies of Nova Scotia and Quebec, and latter's colonization was rendered complicated by presence of French-speaking, Roman Catholic Canadians who had remained in New France after it had been finally ceded to English in 1763. One hundred years later both Arabella and her creator would undoubtedly have been surprised and delighted by progress of colonies. As a result of emigration of United Empire Loyalists from United States after American War of Independence, Nova Scotia had been divided into two colonies, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, and Quebec had become Upper Canada and Lower Canada. In 1830s all four colonies had achieved responsible government (that is, an executive council answerable to an elected assembly). Although religious, linguistic, and even legal differences frequently bedeviled relations between English and French Canadians, in 1867 these two groups joined with Nova Scotians and New Brunswickers in an experiment in peaceful nation-